Posts tagged "Introduction to Elixir"

Introduction to Elixir

Elixir is a very scalable and dynamically functional typed language built on Erlang’s VM. While this application has become prominent in some highly concurrent web applications, many people are still yet very unfamiliar with it. This article will take us through what Elixir is.

The main features of Elixir

– It is built on top of Erlang’s VM; this means that for all of the concurrency tools that Erlang possesses, Elixir has access to it. This has made it one of the most powerful programming languages for building highly scalable systems.

– It has a Ruby-like syntax; If you’ve had to program with Ruby at one time or the other, then Elixir becomes easy for you to navigate. Even though Ruby is a productivity-oriented language, it is deficient in concurrency and performance. However, this deficiency is made up for with Elixir.

– Elixir is highly functional; Elixir is not just process-oriented, but it also has all the constructs you anticipate from most modern programming languages. In addition, an immutable data structure and pattern matching further confers on it its high functionality.

– Elixir possesses dynamic typing in contrast to other functional languages such as Haskell and Scala. This insinuates that typing is checked in run time and not during compilation. This helps to increase the development speed for simple web applications.

Benefits of Elixir

– Concurrency; Elixir utilizes isolated processes and runs across all central processing units, and communicates via messages. In addition, the immutability of the data structure makes it easy to write concurrent programs on Elixir

– Scalability; The processes it possesses also ensure that it scales systems easily, either horizontally or vertically.

– Reliability; Elixir has a different approach to fault- tolerance; the supervisor system can quickly restart the lightweight processes in case of any production failure.

Functional Programming

Unlike some programming languages such as JavaScript or Python, Elixir code is structured in functions and modules instead of objects and classes. Furthermore, all of the data types are immutable. What functional programming does is that it takes advantage of many things such as declarative style of writing codes, pattern- matching and higher-order functions. With all of these, you achieve attendant benefits such as better testing and debugging, easier handling of concurrent programs, better maintenance, and high-level abstractions that simplify coding.

Phoenix 

Phoenix enables you to efficiently churn out web apps while not compromising on either speed or maintainability. The lightweight processes of Elixir are fantastic for problem-solving, especially concerning concurrency and scalability in web services. However, it is essential to note that the ecosystem of Phoenix and Elixir is not as mature and robust as that of Ruby on Rails or Python’s Django, so that one might run into problems. Well, the important thing is that the benefits outweigh the costs.